We looked at him as if he were some kind of supernatural being. Old Cat’s face had turned pale. “What does it say?” he asked.
Pei Qing leaned over the desk, snatched my notebook from me, and began to scrawl. We crowded around, several of us fishing out cigarettes. As he worked, we smoked and observed his progress. He had memorized the translation for the code and was writing the correlated word next to each group of eight numbers. At last, he handed us the notebook to see what he had written:
Extreme28171653
Danger06047145
Save23972757
Us20530226
Stop02552972
Prospecting05222232
“The telegram is a cry for help!” several of us gasped.
Everything then happened extremely fast. As Old Cat looked at the translated text, faint beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He told Old Tang to gather everyone together. We had to set off at once. They were in danger, he said, and we couldn’t delay for an instant.
In reality, we were all aware that this ghostly transmission had been sent some time ago. The sender had probably already suffered some untimely fate. Still, it was our duty as the rescue team to assume the best. We had to believe the people we were tasked with rescuing were still alive. While we were readying our equipment, Old Cat stopped a few of us and said we had to stay here. Something bad had surely happened up ahead, he said. We were completely in the dark about the danger awaiting us. If we all entered together and whatever happened to the other team befell us as well, our entire group would be annihilated. A few of us needed to stay behind and form the second echelon. Once the first unit made it safely, they would send someone back to notify us.
We objected. How could they expect us to go along with this? “Why don’t you guys be the second echelon?” said Wang Sichuan. “I’d never do anything so cowardly.”
Old Cat just shook his head. “Right now this is a military operation,” he said, “and Old Tang has the most weight around here. This is what he wants. Obey orders! In any case, all of you are injured. Staying behind is in your best interest.”
Saying this, he walked off. Wang Sichuan bristled, but after Old Cat mentioned the word orders, he could no longer protest. Everyone knew that Old Tang was a softie. These orders must have come from Old Cat himself.
He hadn’t gone more than a few steps when he suddenly turned back. “You can understand telegraphic code,” he said to Pei Qing. “That’ll probably come in handy. They’ll stay here, but you come along.”
Pei Qing seemed to have been expecting this. Smirking, he turned to us. “Take good care of the place!” he said, his voice sickening. Wang Sichuan was so angry he was almost spitting blood.
We watched them board the three boats and quickly push off from the bank. The person at the head of each shined his flashlight along the cave walls, searching for the power cables. Twenty minutes later, all three had disappeared into the dark of the cave, their noises moving farther and farther away. I was not accustomed to the sudden quiet that descended upon us. Looking around, we discovered that, in addition to Wang Sichuan and I, the deputy squad leader and three engineering corpsmen had also been left behind. All at once I felt a kind of sadness.
What should we do now? Wang Sichuan asked me. All I could say was that Old Cat had a point. We were injured. There was no denying it. In a way he had been doing us a favor. All five of us squatted down. Even the deputy squad leader looked crestfallen. A soldier doesn’t fear death, only that he might be unable to join the battle. There was nothing to do but look for a few cigarettes to console them with. As I reached into my pocket, I was given a start. I withdrew my hand. There was another note.
CHAPTER 25
The Second Note
The note was superficially identical to the one I had been given on the rocky shoal, both torn from our worker’s insurance documents. Paper back then was thick, yellowed, and rough, not at all like today’s high-quality stock. Opening it, I saw, once again, only a few small characters: “Enter the sinkhole.”
The three characters were written in an exceedingly sloppy manner, so sloppily that it took me a while to figure out what they said. They’d been jotted down in a terrific rush. I could feel my heart thump heavily in my chest. Enter the sinkhole? I turned and looked to where it yawned amid the circle of iron railings. It wasn’t far away. All of the power cables hung from its mouth like the tentacles of an octopus, winding together in thick bundles. Between these river water ran down into its black depths. Enter this sinkhole? I was confused and reached inside my pocket once more, but besides my cigarettes, I found nothing else. Who could have slipped it in there? When I discovered the first note, warning me to “Beware of Pei Qing,” I had disregarded it, assuming it was some trick played by Chen Luohu. Now, having received a second one, I was forced to take it seriously.
Wang Sichuan and the rest were all squatting nearby. They saw the mix of emotions that played across my face. They all crowded around to take a look. Knowing I wouldn’t be able to resolve the matter myself, I handed it over. Maybe one of them could figure out just what the hell was going on.
Wang Sichuan gulped and said it had to be a clue, but damned if he knew who it was from or why they’d given it to us like this. Could our team be harboring an enemy spy? We all agreed that was a possibility. Otherwise there would be no need to convey information so surreptitiously. Wang Sichuan then jumped to his feet, saying, “Comrades, the chance to win honor has arrived! It looks as if there’s something fishy going on in that sinkhole and the enemy spy cannot be allowed to find out about it. Thus it was we who were covertly appointed to investigate. This shows the confidence our comrades have in us. Come on then, there’s no time to waste—let’s begin at once!”
I stopped him. “Something’s not right. We need to make some kind of plan first. We don’t even know who placed the note in my pocket. Let’s first go down to the mouth of the sinkhole and take a look. Even if we really are going to explore it, we still shouldn’t make that decision hastily.” Wang Sichuan nodded, adding that, in fact, this was just what he had intended all along. So we turned on our flashlights and made our way over to the sinkhole.
The engineering corpsmen who’d just surveyed this area had left their anchors and locks. With these we made our way smoothly down the wall to where the sinkhole opened. To be honest, I hadn’t looked at the sinkhole too closely until now. When we first arrived, I’d noticed straightaway how slippery the rock was around the entrance and so hadn’t dared get any closer. The mouth was big enough to drive a jeep through, though the tangle of electrical wires took up almost half the space. The remaining gap was pitchblack, and out of it blew an intermittent cold wind.
Thanks to the soundness of my exam-based education, I could already tell what it would be like inside just by looking at it. Indeed, sinkhole was a rather apt description of the thing. Despite being located deep underground, it was fundamentally identical to sinkholes on the surface, having been formed by erosion as water flowed down a vertical crack in the rock. I didn’t know how deep it went, but once the surface water had penetrated to a certain depth, the sinkhole would either begin to slope down along the rock strata—descending gradually into the earth like a set of stairs—or form a tilted joint, becoming winding and complex. This sinkhole was a kind of cave within a cave. The water most likely exited through some hair-thin crack at the end to become groundwater, but it was also possible that beneath our feet there was another cave system or that somewhere down below was an even deeper tributary of the underground river.